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In education, income is a loud variable that makes understanding how schools are doing a bit like trying to stargaze amidst the flashing lights of Times Square.
Researchers, journalists and schools themselves have exhaustively documented the tight correlation between income and test scores – as a neighborhood’s’ income increases, so do the corresponding schools’ test scores and vice versa.
But those higher test scores don’t mean wealthier schools are simply better.
The challenges kids face in the outside world don’t disappear when they walk into a classroom. Regardless of how talented a teacher is, students who are malnourished or haven’t slept well, for example, will have a harder time learning. Because of those challenges – and contracts that often allow teachers to transfer to different schools when they become more experienced – lower-income schools can have high turnover and less experienced teachers.
Students in wealthier neighborhoods tend to have fewer of those challenges.
Karin Chenoweth, an author and researcher who has for years written about the strategies employed by high-performing but low-income schools, put this dichotomy succinctly.
“High performing, high socioeconomic status schools, you don’t really know what’s going on there,” Chenoweth said.
They could be fabulous schools that are academically rigorous, warm and welcoming and add genuine value to kids’ lives, Chenoweth said.
“Or not. They’re replicating their socioeconomic status,” she continued.
After all, if a kid falls behind, wealthy parents have the wherewithal to ensure their kids catch up, whether through hiring tutors, working with their kids directly or just taking them out of that school.
“Whereas if you have a high performing high poverty school, in my experience, it’s because they’re doing everything right,” Chenoweth said.
Ultimately, the deck is stacked against schools who serve lower-income communities – even when those schools are doing the best they can. Simple test scores can obscure the good work, or unfairly celebrate the mediocre work, that goes on at schools every day.
With this in mind, a few years ago, in partnership with the data gurus at UC San Diego Extended Studies Center for Research and Evaluation, Voice of San Diego created a new metric for A Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools that seeks to cut through some of the noise.
Enter our income vs. test score figure: This figure uses the percentage of students at each school who qualify for free and reduced-price meals – the closest approximation for a school community’s poverty level – to project how we’d expect its students to score on state standardized tests. From there, we bring in the school’s actual test scores to determine if they have exceeded or fallen short of that projection. Schools with scores of “0” are performing exactly as well their poverty level would indicate, while schools with scores above “0” are doing better and schools with negative scores are doing worse.
The results can be illuminating.
Edison Elementary in City Heights, for example, has for years had pretty good test scores. They’re not fabulous, but they are good. But when you take into account that over 90 percent of Edison’s students qualify for free and reduced-priced meals, those scores look very different.
Most schools with that level of poverty score far below average. Edison outperforms expectations by leaps and bounds – so much so that out of the 700 schools countywide we analyzed this last year, Edison scored the highest on our income vs. test score metric. The metric gives parents a way to dig deeper than topline scores to see how much value each school is adding to a child’s education.
Edison’s results aren’t some statistical anomaly. Back in 2021, the school had the fourth-highest score in the county. And in 2020, former education reporter Will Huntsberry dug into what made the school so special. Fun fact, Edison’s trend-bucking helped inspire the creation of the metric.
Without digging deeper, the excellence of schools like Edison would be hidden by what appear to be just-OK test scores. But with the metric, we can better understand what it takes to help all students succeed, regardless of the barriers they face.